NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, left, NASA Goddard Center Director Chris Scolese, center, and Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski, right, talk to the press during a tour of NASA Goddard facilitites on Oct. 22, 2013. Bolden’s visit to Goddard was the first by the administrator to a NASA field center following the government shutdown that halted most of the space agency’s activities from Oct. 1 -16, 2013.
They are standing outside a cleanroom for the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMS) mission. MMS, tentatively set to launch in October 2014, is a series of four satellites that will investigate how the Sun’s and Earth’s magnetic fields connect and disconnect, explosively transferring energy from one to the other in a process that is important at the Sun, other planets, and everywhere in the universe, known as magnetic reconnection.
Credit: NASA/Goddard/Bill Hrybyk